I’m using Omni Outliner 5.3.4 on a Mac. I’m another of those people that’s got lots of experience in how to use styles in other apps (InDesign, Apple Pages, MS Word, etc) and am occasionally baffled by how styles work in Omni Outliner. Mostly, I’ve been able to eventually figure it out. But I’ve hit a wall with this one. Sometimes my notes are extensive, and I’d like to break up a note into several paragraphs. I can hit Return and get a “hard return” to bring my cursor all the way back to the left on a new line. But I can’t seem to find any way to create some space between one paragraph and the next. Line height controls distance between all lines, including inside a paragraph. Under “Row”, “Above note” increases the distance between the Note text and the normal Row above it, but doesn’t affect the distance between one Note paragraph and another. It would be so much easier to read if there was some way to adjust that. I can put in an extra Return between paragraphs, but that’s more space than I want. I guess I’m being fussy here, but it seems to me that there are so many controls in the Inspector for spacing, padding, etc it shouldn’t be hard to let the user control this particular aspect. Am I missing something here? Any suggestions welcome. Thanks!
There does not seem to be a paragraph spacing setting as other text based apps have.
With its focus on delimiting ideas into Rows, it’s not surprising that OO doesn’t provide paragraph spacing. However back in v3.x there was a much richer set of formatting attributes to work with (incl para-spacing, I believe), which I found particularly useful in the Notes “column”. I think it was in 4.x that they stripped away a lot of those feature — very disappointed at the time.
What’s interesting is, OO does recognize paragraph-spacing in text pasted from other applications. So for example, let’s suppose you write a paragraph of text in TextEdit, apply 6pt space-before, then copy that text into OO (using Edit > Paste With Original Style). If you do this, the spacing will appear correctly in your OO document.
What you can do with THAT is a bit of a kludge, but you might be able to incorporate it into your workflow:
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With your formatted text selected, look at the Style Attributes section of the Inspector: you’ll see that your paragraph spacing appears as an “attribute tile” (I don’t know the official name.)
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You can now use that attribute tile to create or modify a Named Style. (I’ll assume unless you reply otherwise that you know how to do that.)
Not the most loveable solution, I admit. Named Styles are document-specific (unless you make them generally available through templates) and each Name Style can implement only one specific spacing. (If you want space-above-6pt and space-above-8pt both available, you need two Named Style.)
Nevertheless… I hope you find it useful :)
